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New Insight into Signaling and Autophagy in Plants 3.0

A special issue of International Journal of Molecular Sciences (ISSN 1422-0067). This special issue belongs to the section "Molecular Plant Sciences".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 April 2025 | Viewed by 7003

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Faculty of Agronomy, Horticulture and Bioengineering, Poznań University of Life Sciences, Poznań, Poland
Interests: abiotic and biotic stress; autophagy; cell signaling; cyclic nucleotides; uncommon nucleotides; molecular plant physiology; plant biochemistry; plant biotechnology; plant cell biology; plant molecular biology; plant tissue culture; signal transduction pathways
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Guest Editor
Department of Plant Physiology, Faculty of Biology, Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań, Uniwersytetu Poznańskiego 6, 61-614 Poznań, Poland
Interests: autophagy; autophagic body degradation; plant physiology and biochemistry; programmed cell death (PCD); pexophagy; seed metabolism; selective autophagy; sugar starvation; seed development and germination; storage lipid metabolism; uncommon nucleotides; vacuolar processing enzymes (VPE); vacuole
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

During the entirety of ontogenesis, plants are forced to sense signals and react as well as adapt to changing and often adverse environmental conditions. Intracellular signal networks are involved in activating, regulating, and silencing various plant responses to environmental stimuli. Plants must also possess systems that exchange information throughout the entire organism to ensure the coordination of development and defense. The signaling systems transmitting this information are complex and involve multiple components, which are far from being fully understood.

One of the processes that enable plants to respond efficiently to changing environments, both internal and external, is autophagy. The efficient functioning of autophagy ensures the proper growth and development of plants at every stage of ontogenesis. Under normal conditions autophagy is a housekeeping process, allowing the recycling of damaged or unnecessary organelles and protein complexes, and, under various types of biotic and abiotic stresses, can be an essential element of plant defense responses. The autophagic turnover of organelles and protein complexes occurs in a controlled and selective manner. The attention of many scientists is currently focused on identifying the elements of signaling pathways in addition to the mechanisms of marking, recognizing, and directing particular cell components to autophagic degradation in the vacuole.

This Special Issue will publish original research papers, reviews, short reviews, opinion articles, and hypotheses within the scope of the newest discoveries in signaling and autophagy in plants. In particular, we welcome papers showing molecular data on signal perception and transduction as well as selective types of autophagy in plants.

Dr. Małgorzata Pietrowska-Borek
Prof. Dr. Sławomir Borek
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • autophagy cargo receptors
  • autophagy in plant development
  • autophagy in plant stress
  • crosstalk between autophagy and phytohormones
  • plant cell homeostasis
  • nutrients recycling
  • plant cell biology
  • plant signal transduction
  • selective autophagy
  • signaling molecules

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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16 pages, 2536 KiB  
Article
Interactome of Arabidopsis ATG5 Suggests Functions beyond Autophagy
by Pernilla H. Elander, Sanjana Holla, Igor Sabljić, Emilio Gutierrez-Beltran, Patrick Willems, Peter V. Bozhkov and Elena A. Minina
Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2023, 24(15), 12300; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms241512300 - 1 Aug 2023
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 3028
Abstract
Autophagy is a catabolic pathway capable of degrading cellular components ranging from individual molecules to organelles. Autophagy helps cells cope with stress by removing superfluous or hazardous material. In a previous work, we demonstrated that transcriptional upregulation of two autophagy-related genes, ATG5 and [...] Read more.
Autophagy is a catabolic pathway capable of degrading cellular components ranging from individual molecules to organelles. Autophagy helps cells cope with stress by removing superfluous or hazardous material. In a previous work, we demonstrated that transcriptional upregulation of two autophagy-related genes, ATG5 and ATG7, in Arabidopsis thaliana positively affected agronomically important traits: biomass, seed yield, tolerance to pathogens and oxidative stress. Although the occurrence of these traits correlated with enhanced autophagic activity, it is possible that autophagy-independent roles of ATG5 and ATG7 also contributed to the phenotypes. In this study, we employed affinity purification and LC-MS/MS to identify the interactome of wild-type ATG5 and its autophagy-inactive substitution mutant, ATG5K128R Here we present the first interactome of plant ATG5, encompassing not only known autophagy regulators but also stress-response factors, components of the ubiquitin-proteasome system, proteins involved in endomembrane trafficking, and potential partners of the nuclear fraction of ATG5. Furthermore, we discovered post-translational modifications, such as phosphorylation and acetylation present on ATG5 complex components that are likely to play regulatory functions. These results strongly indicate that plant ATG5 complex proteins have roles beyond autophagy itself, opening avenues for further investigations on the complex roles of autophagy in plant growth and stress responses. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Insight into Signaling and Autophagy in Plants 3.0)
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31 pages, 5851 KiB  
Article
Sugar Starvation Disrupts Lipid Breakdown by Inducing Autophagy in Embryonic Axes of Lupin (Lupinus spp.) Germinating Seeds
by Sławomir Borek, Szymon Stefaniak, Katarzyna Nuc, Łukasz Wojtyla, Ewelina Ratajczak, Ewa Sitkiewicz, Agata Malinowska, Bianka Świderska, Karolina Wleklik and Małgorzata Pietrowska-Borek
Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2023, 24(14), 11773; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms241411773 - 21 Jul 2023
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2092
Abstract
Under nutrient deficiency or starvation conditions, the mobilization of storage compounds during seed germination is enhanced to primarily supply respiratory substrates and hence increase the potential of cell survival. Nevertheless, we found that, under sugar starvation conditions in isolated embryonic axes of white [...] Read more.
Under nutrient deficiency or starvation conditions, the mobilization of storage compounds during seed germination is enhanced to primarily supply respiratory substrates and hence increase the potential of cell survival. Nevertheless, we found that, under sugar starvation conditions in isolated embryonic axes of white lupin (Lupinus albus L.) and Andean lupin (Lupinus mutabilis Sweet) cultured in vitro for 96 h, the disruption of lipid breakdown occurs, as was reflected in the higher lipid content in the sugar-starved (-S) than in the sucrose-fed (+S) axes. We postulate that pexophagy (autophagic degradation of the peroxisome—a key organelle in lipid catabolism) is one of the reasons for the disruption in lipid breakdown under starvation conditions. Evidence of pexophagy can be: (i) the higher transcript level of genes encoding proteins of pexophagy machinery, and (ii) the lower content of the peroxisome marker Pex14p and its increase caused by an autophagy inhibitor (concanamycin A) in -S axes in comparison to the +S axes. Additionally, based on ultrastructure observation, we documented that, under sugar starvation conditions lipophagy (autophagic degradation of whole lipid droplets) may also occur but this type of selective autophagy seems to be restricted under starvation conditions. Our results also show that autophagy occurs at the very early stages of plant growth and development, including the cells of embryonic seed organs, and allows cell survival under starvation conditions. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Insight into Signaling and Autophagy in Plants 3.0)
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14 pages, 4185 KiB  
Brief Report
Identification and Potential Participation of Lipases in Autophagic Body Degradation in Embryonic Axes of Lupin (Lupinus spp.) Germinating Seeds
by Karolina Wleklik, Szymon Stefaniak, Katarzyna Nuc, Małgorzata Pietrowska-Borek and Sławomir Borek
Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2024, 25(1), 90; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms25010090 - 20 Dec 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1071
Abstract
Autophagy is a fundamental process for plants that plays a crucial role in maintaining cellular homeostasis and promoting survival in response to various environmental stresses. One of the lesser-known stages of plant autophagy is the degradation of autophagic bodies in vacuoles. To this [...] Read more.
Autophagy is a fundamental process for plants that plays a crucial role in maintaining cellular homeostasis and promoting survival in response to various environmental stresses. One of the lesser-known stages of plant autophagy is the degradation of autophagic bodies in vacuoles. To this day, no plant vacuolar enzyme has been confirmed to be involved in this process. On the other hand, several enzymes have been described in yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), including Atg15, that possess lipolytic activity. In this preliminary study, which was conducted on isolated embryonic axes of the white lupin (Lupinus albus L.) and Andean lupin (Lupinus mutabilis Sweet), the potential involvement of plant vacuolar lipases in the degradation of autophagic bodies was investigated. We identified in transcriptomes (using next-generation sequencing (NGS)) of white and Andean lupin embryonic axes 38 lipases with predicted vacuolar localization, and for three of them, similarities in amino acid sequences with yeast Atg15 were found. A comparative transcriptome analysis of lupin isolated embryonic axes cultured in vitro under different sucrose and asparagine nutrition, evaluating the relations in the levels of the transcripts of lipase genes, was also carried out. A clear decrease in lipase gene transcript levels caused by asparagine, a key amino acid in lupin seed metabolism which retards the degradation of autophagic bodies during sugar-starvation-induced autophagy in lupin embryonic axes, was detected. Although the question of whether lipases are involved in the degradation of autophagic bodies during plant autophagy is still open, our findings strongly support such a hypothesis. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Insight into Signaling and Autophagy in Plants 3.0)
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